Here’s the Skinny
As service providers ourselves, we place the highest of priority on providing excellent value. To kick off our services and this news letter, we’re giving you a review of a Local Reputation whitepaper provided by inbound marketing specialists Hubspot. If you’re not famialiar with Hubspot, they’re a group of savvy marketing specialists founded by MIT graduates and they’re worth following, although their software is very expensive, they still provide some great marketing advice.
While the paper is about 18 months old, but still has a lot of useful information including the importance of Google’s introduction of Places, which has since been renamed to Google Plus. This is Google’s directory and we highly advise signing up to receive their notices at webmaster tools if you’re interested at all in following what advice they have in boosting your website’s rankings.
One of the important things to notice about this document is that it actually doesn’t include some of the important changes that were pushed through their “Panda” Update. One of those big things is that now, at least in the US and Canadian market and soon to be in Global markets, their search queries show the reviews right under the name of the business so consumers can quickly and easily locate a link to what people are saying about your business.
As can be seen in the graphic on the left, if users go to search for your service and area, some of the top listings are ranked together listing the number of reviews and GASP, those with the highest Google Score show right in the search. This has big impact for those business listings that 1) have more than 10 Google Reviews 2) have higher than a 22 score. As you can see, not a lot of businesses rank that highly yet for a lot of services, so it’s important to think about starting to build that score now. In a year or two, those people that start now will be that much further ahead than their competition. If you are worried about the impacts of Google Reviews, or your reputation at all, just reach out to us at info@guestretain.com, and we’ll send an Intelligent Reputation Review the same day, free of course.
While the content in this white paper is more broad than just reviews, I think that the average Spa owner or Hotel GM can gain some useful tips and insights into the types of strategies they can use to start getting better rankings for their business.
If you’d like to see the Reputation Marketing white paper in its entirety, please follow the link to download it or book mark it. If you think this information was useful, please feel free to Tweet it to your contacts!
